Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd - A Post-Jungian Perspective

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland); comics (Batman); `penny dreadfuls' cum musicals (Sweeney Todd); highly symbolic antiutopias (Planet of the Apes); and classic Gothic hits refracted through the prism of B-cinema (the Frankenstein monster, Poe's Raven). One might argue that grotesque and mythological genres are schematic (which made them so popular with `basic' formalists like Vladimir Propp, archetypal formalists like Joseph Campbell or interpretative archetypalists like Northrop Frye). For Burton, however, allegorical genres are the main, and the most effective, way of sublimating his personal material. He explains his choice (with total disregard for academic terminology): Because I never read, my fairy tales were probably those monster movies. To me, they're fairly similar. I mean, fairy tales are extremely violent and extremely symbolic and disturbing, probably even more so than Frankenstein and stuff like that, which are kind of mythic and perceived as fairy-tale-like. [. . .] Growing up, I guess, it was a reaction against a very puritanical, bureaucratic, ®fties nuclear family environment ± me resisting seeing things laid out, seeing things exactly as they were. That's why I've always liked the idea of fairy tales or folk tales, because they're symbolic of something else. There's a foundation to them, but there's more besides, they're open to interpretation. I always liked that, seeing things and just having your own idea about them. (Salisbury, 2006: 3) It is interesting that Burton's choice of styles and methods is not dictated by their aesthetic qualities, but is based on an assumption which you do not often hear from an auteur: ®lms can be ideologically and structurally loose, and should generally invite interpretative pluralism. This position is similar to that of another advocate of open interpretation, vague symbolism and loose structures, Andrey Tarkovsky, who held the opinion that the audience was entitled to `. . . the opportunity to live through what is happening on the screen as if it were his own life, to take over, as deeply personal as his own, the experience imprinted in time upon the screen, relating his own life to what is being shown' (Tarkovsky, 1989: 183). Unlike Tarkovsky, however, who chose a complex way of expressing the symbolic with realistic means, Burton is formally simple, schematic, plush and essentially `pop', which allows him to attract and retain a much bigger fan base than an average circle of auteur connoisseurs. Ways of analysing the symbol Introduction 21 It is for this reason, and taking into consideration the `plastic' and allegorical character of Burton's ®lms, that I have chosen Jungian analytical psychology as my principal interpretative tool. I picked it from a highly http://www.jungarena.com/tim-burton-the-monster-and-the-crowd-9780415489713
22 Introduction competitive pool of valid and astute methodologies because, in my view, it perfectly suits the layout and meaning of Burton's works, his creative habits, as well as his sublimation stimuli. Tim Burton is an essentially archetypal director in the sense that he works with basic mythological motifs. The principal themes of his ®lms, especially the father±son con¯ict, call for a psychoanalytic approach. As a practising psychotherapist and `interpreter of dreams', Jung was more interested in the syntagmatic realisation of mythological structures than their history, formal properties or comparative possibilities. My choice of Jung over Freud and the post-Freudians is a matter of their different approaches to the treatment of symbols ± whether in dreams or in the arts. Bearing in mind Burton's anti-linguistic (or alinguistic) tendencies, Freudian, Lacanian and post-Freudian theories are less applicable because they place the linguistic above the visual. As Steven Walker observes, `By emphasising the image over the word, Jungian psychology differentiates itself radically from Freudian, Lacanian and other psychologies that stress the task of interpreting the language of the unconscious' (Walker, 2002: 3). Don Fredericksen draws attention to another aspect of the same problem: Freud's `semiotic' (possibility of exact interpretation) and Jung's `symbolic' attitude (ampli®cation, or deferred interpretation) to the creative and dream-imagery. Jung does not see the unconscious as being linguistically structured, hence his rejection of semiotics in favour of ampli®cation. Jung writes in Psychological Types: The concept of symbol should in my view be strictly distinguished from that of sign. Symbolic and semiotic meanings are entirely different things ...Asymbol always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact, which is nonetheless known to exist or is postulated as existing . . . Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. [. . .] The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found that formulated the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the hitherto accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, i.e., it possesses only an historical signi®cance ...Anexpression that stands for a known thing remains a mere sign and not a symbol. It is, therefore, quite impossible to create a living symbol, i.e., one that is pregnant with meaning, from known associations. (Jung, 1971: CW6: paras. 814±818) Thus, a symbol is a relative and `immediate' thing, rather than a permanent, ready-made set of meanings. In a symbol, the relationship between the http://www.jungarena.com/tim-burton-the-monster-and-the-crowd-9780415489713
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Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd - A Post-Jungian Perspective

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